Battered for seeking cop’s ID

OUR BUREAU

Rajkumar Saha
(Mayukh Sengupta)

The family of a young man assaulted on a railway platform 10 days ago has accused the Railway Protection Force (RPF) of trying to hush up the incident to protect the four unidentified personnel allegedly behind the attack.

Rajkumar Saha, 25, said on Sunday that he had been targeted for asking an “RPF guard” in plainclothes to show his identity card at Dum Dum Cantonment station on the night of July 31.

The unidentified guard had allegedly asked Rajkumar to leave the platform without reason. Rajkumar, who owns an autorickshaw spare parts shop, was there with a friend around midnight after missing a train back home.

According to a complaint lodged by his sister Srabani with the Dum Dum GRP on August 1, the accused and three accomplices attacked Rajkumar with sticks, leading to profuse bleeding from his left ear.

Doctors found a fractured bone above Saha’s left ear.

“They didn’t spare my friend either. We had been waiting for the last Dum Dum-bound train for the day when a man who identified him as an RPF guard ordered us to leave the platform. The man left after I asked him to show his ID card, only to return with three others. They assaulted me for more than 20 minutes,” Rajkumar said.

The young man had gone to his in-laws’ house in Dum Dum Cantonment with friend Asish Mandal that day. “We missed a train around midnight and decided to take the next one. As we sat on a bench on platform number one, the RPF man came up and accused us of loitering,” Rajkumar recounted.

“Since the man was not in uniform but claimed to be an RPF guard, I asked him to show us his identity card. He walked off after threatening to teach us a lesson for daring to ask him to prove his identity. The man returned within five minutes with three others. They first pushed me and when I protested, they started beating me up. When my friend tried to intervene, the four of them pushed him and he fell on the railway tracks,” said Rajkumar, who was discharged from a private hospital on Saturday.

Rajkumar said he fainted when one of the men hit him on the left side of his head with a stick.

His friend called a common acquaintance who stays near Dum Dum Cantonment station, seeking assistance.

“My friend came and saved Rajkumar, who was lying on the platform with blood oozing out of his left ear. We took him to RG Kar Hospital and informed his family members,” recalled Asish.

Rajkumar’s sister, who works for an IT firm in Salt Lake’s Sector V, said that doctors at RG Kar hospital advised her family to take her brother to SSKM Hospital as nobody was available at the neurology department at that hour.

“At SSKM, we could not get my brother admitted even after waiting for three hours. We took him to a private health facility around 10am on August 1,” Srabani said.

She alleged that a man who who identified himself as an RPF officer called to ask her not to lodge a police complaint. “The man offered to pay half the cost of my brother’s treatment if we didn’t lodge a complaint.”

Utpal Naskar, superintendent of police, Sealdah GRP, said: “We have received a complaint and a case has been started against four unidentified RPF men. Our effort to identify the accused is on.”

A senior official of Eastern Railway said the GRP was trying to find out what “the men were doing on the platform late in the night”.